I didn’t really want an Xbox 360 at first. Or at least, that’s the story I used to tell myself.

I’m one of the idiots who actually made a point of tuning in to MTV’s sophomoric unveiling of Microsoft’s sophomore console in the fall of 2004, and the embarrassing spectacle left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. And to be clear, at that point my Xbox was my primary gaming machine. I kept my Gamecube and PlayStation 2 at the ready for the few wonderful games that were still trickling in (GTA: San Andreas, Resident Evil 4 and Shadow of the Colossus…what a great period for gaming) but with Halo 2 burning up the University Housing intranet, nothing in my dorm room got more play than my Xbox.*

But with a weak launch lineup and a massive price tag, the Xbox 360 didn’t sway me right away. No surprises there. I held off until 2003 to get an original Xbox, after all. But the Xbox 360? No thanks – I’ll stick to my standard-def consoles for now.

That was my mandate, and it served me well. Then it was late 2006, and my buddy Dan invited me over to play Gears of War.

The next day, I bought an Xbox 360.

I think it’s easy to forget just how transformative Gears of War was for this console generation. So many of its core components – third-person cover-based combat, visceral camera effects, co-operative gameplay where positioning is paramount – are now seen in almost every major blockbuster game.

More than anything, the experience of playing felt genuine in a way no other game had. Characters moved with an uncanny sense of weight, guns sounded raw and real, and chainsaw kills delivered a disgusting-yet-intoxicating sense of victory that I’d never experienced before. It felt like I was playing a game from the future.

I played through Gears of War cooperatively more times than I can count. It was the ultimate buddy-game, with satisfying combat, tight pacing and brilliantly composed combat sequences. And the story was pitch-perfect, with a rag-tag group of gruff, oversized space marines bickering and talking shit while fighting against impossible odds. It’s summer blockbuster popcorn fare as translated deftly to the interactive space.

Gears of War 2 didn’t impress me like the first game did, although it did manage to deliver a solid experience start-to-finish. But for whatever reason I was beyond excited to finally play the third chapter in the series. And it really didn’t disappoint.

I played through it entirely in co-op, as Epic intended. And honestly? It was just fantastic. There’s not much more to be said. If you like Gears of War, this is the best game in the series.

I was surprised just how sad I was when I reached the end. Gears of War isn’t a game with a story to tug at the heartstrings or anything, but I felt a sense of loss I couldn’t really explain at the time. Since then, I think I’ve figured it out:

This was the first true next-generation game – the first game to make me a believer in the next major stage in game design – and seeing it come to a close is a little sobering. Sure, Epic is bound to make a new game in the Gears universe sooner or later, but I can’t help but feel like this is something of a swan song for the Xbox 360, even if the next console hasn’t yet been announced. I’m sure great things are on the horizon, but as far as games go, finishing Gears of War 3 felt very much like I was finishing a major chapter in gaming.

We don’t hand out review scores at Silicon Sasquatch, but given how brilliant a job Epic has done in concluding the Gears of War series, I’m going to skirt around tradition and award Gears of War 3 a record-breaking ten out of ten shitloads.

Well done, Epic. Thanks for pushing the status quo so far ahead and for building something truly great.

*Including me.

Video game ads on television are often terrible. Being the sole member of the Silicon Sasquatch executive triumvirate who watches sports on TV on a regular basis, I’m also the one who gets exposed to a lot of the big-budget video game advertising campaigns. As a gamer with an interest in the business side of the industry, it’s always interesting to see which games are trying to push for mainstream attention — and by what means.

That made the new Dead Space 2 advertisement currently getting national air time all that much worse. Go ahead and watch the ad – it’s right there at the top of the post. I can wait a minute for you.

Without sounding too flippant, let me just say: Thank you, Electronic Arts, for dragging videogames back 10 years in the public’s eye.

There are a few significant things wrong with that ad:

• The campaign implies that all gamers want is a healthy serving of the old ultraviolence, topped with extra violence with a serving of some blood and guts on the side. “It’s everything you love in a game” is one of the more misguided and alienating quotes I’ve heard in a while.
• It’s trying to sell the game as a deplorable, hyper-violent “game your mom will hate” — to the degree that the website teased on the final title card is YourMomHatesThis.com.

I’ve seen the ad on TV and YouTube over and over, and I just can’t get past how ill-advised the entire campaign appears to be. Let’s start with the most egregious complaint: The thesis of the entire ad campaign is, essentially, “this game is awesome because it’s all the things your mom will hate.” That doesn’t exactly seem like the strongest point of recommendation for the game. Not only is it a flimsy claim to make, but it’s aimed at a specific target demographic — teenagers who listen to angsty music and say “no, fuck YOU, Dad!” — who happen to (generally) be younger than the game’s listed Mature rating.

That is a real delicate point: I can’t think of many adult gamers who are going to think the campaign is funny, let alone persuasive. Frankly, the “Your mom is going to HATE this” tactic really only resonates with teenagers. It looks like EA is trying to market directly at teenagers by taking this stance, and it’s worrying; there’s definitely an ethical issue in advertising an M-rated game to a demographic under the age of 18. And with the videogame industry already fighting to protect its freedom of speech, marketing a violent videogame to underage consumers isn’t exactly the sort of press needed at this moment.

This ad campaign reeks of desperation. Dead Space was born in a period where Electronic Arts was trying to live up to its name, putting out risky games like Mirror’s Edge and attempting to cater to critics as much as the mass audience. Clearly it hasn’t been as successful as anticipated, so out come the gimmicks. It reeks of the shenanigans EA’s marketing teams pulled trying to draw attention to Dante’s Inferno last year, including splashing for a Super Bowl ad. They must be desperate for attention, seeing as how the Halo and Gears of War series have gone the subdued route in the past in advertising equally violent, equally M-rated games. And never mind the thought of what Fox News could do with these ads.

Subtlety suggests confidence in the product, but gimmicky, flashy, trashy advertising? Not so much. EA should show more confidence in Dead Space 2.

Shadow of the Colossus' simple, spare storyline has been repeatedly acclaimed as a high-water mark in video game storytelling.

Even before Mario trekked through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue the Princess and Pac-Man was pursued by a quartet of ghosts, video games have been a storytelling medium. As games matured from simple sprites to a multi-billion dollar industry, so the scope of video games increased —in terms of graphical fidelity, size and scope of game worlds, and the potential for storytelling.

The problem, though, is that only two of those three aspects have seen real growth to this point. While our favored medium is still maturing, it’s encountered some growing pains in finding the right way to tell a story — and the right kind of stories to tell.

Warning: Spoilers for Grand Theft Auto IV, Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid, Fallout 3, Fable II, and Shadow of the Colossus follow.

The deep, gritty urban environment of Liberty City created by Rockstar for Grand Theft Auto IV opens up to gamers in a way that both advances the storyline as well as the needs of the player.

While storytelling techniques from books, comics, TV and movies may be applicable to games, the nature of the video game medium means not all of these techniques make best use of the gaming experience. A major difference is that video games are an experiential medium: gamers expect to learn new tricks or techniques, or gain access to new worlds throughout the course of a game. While this may not be as true in sports or racing games, for example, players of single-player-focused games of all genres expect a sort of ramp — both in terms of what skills your character has as well as in difficulty. A game like Ninja Gaiden or God of War would feel stale if your character started the game with the abilities, weapons and skills he or she ended with. In order to increase the difficulty of the game (generally from simple to complex as the game nears its close), those skills are needed to introduce new challenges.

Movies and books do not expect you to make such strides throughout the story— however, the convention of unlocking more and more powerful weapons or abilities throughout a single-player role playing game or action game is a video game standby. An issue games have, then, is telling a powerful story within a framework that also makes sense from a gameplay perspective. Done in a banal or uninspired way, a game feels cliché or trite; but when executed well, games marry storytelling and advancement in a flowing, natural way.

A great example is the post-GTA III Grand Theft Auto games. The game world in Rockstar’s flagship series opens up as missions unlock; the key is that it feels natural. An attempt on the life of GTA IV protagonist Nico Bellic and his cousin early in the game forces them from the first opening area of the game to the next one; while it’s still shepherding the player from one area to another, it makes sense in the context of both gameplay (moving from one level to another) and storytelling.

Another challenge to story is in level structure for many games. While movies and novels go through crests and valleys of action and story progression, games take it to another level and build levels around specific action scenes as well as new mechanics. Take a game like Gears of War 2 as an example. Most every level in the two Gears of War games introduces a new technique or experience — whether that’s riding on a giant excavator and firing from mounted turrets, or working your way through a giant worm, the story is oftentimes molded in such a way as to naturally introduce new scenarios for gamers.

Many aspects of Gears of War and Gears of War 2's storyline rotate around the game's level design, crafting the story around what the designers want the gamer to experience. The chainsaw duel, however, is just badass.

The problem that arises from this is that parts of the story can be cut due to difficulty with getting a level functioning properly. If the game’s engine just flat-out can’t handle a level, or the developers lack the time to finish a scene to their desired quality, it gets cut. Compare this to movies, novels and TV shows, where content is cut in the interest of brevity or relevance — scenes are deleted or pages are cut because they’re excess, not because the director or writer doesn’t know how to shoot them or put them into words.

It’s not the case with games because many story-focused games hone in on gameplay first, with the story built to fit. The Gears of War series is guilty of this, with story built to explain away gameplay concepts, but it’s certainly not the only one out there.

Regardless, the medium is still blossoming in terms of finding new and inventive ways to tell stories. There have been advances in taking the best of post-modern storytelling and combining that with the interactivity of gaming to create something that can only be told through the medium of the video game.

A game like Bioshock is a step in this right direction. It takes a rather ordinary story idea, with a relatively simple plot progression throughout, but throws the player for a loop by manipulating the story within the context of gaming. Bioshock doesn’t succeed because its dystopian, Ayn Rand-inspired story is groundbreaking, but because it takes certain video game tropes — that gamers have a choice, have control, and that a person giving them instructions can be trusted — and uses them to bring meaning to the player. It takes the idea that the narrator and guiding voice in a game can be taken for gospel and stands it on its head. While it’s a simple concept (and one explored in books like The Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22), it’s one that has not been explored in detail in videogames.

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima utilized many interesting technical tricks with the PlayStation, including reading from the memory card for other Konami games in the form of Psycho Mantis reading Solid Snake's mind.

You think you have the game figured out, then it turns out you’ve been a pawn all along. Metal Gear Solid did this, too — along with other mind-tricks that took advantage of the medium. This is best exemplified in the battle with Psycho Mantis, a specially trained super-soldier who could read the protagonist’s – and the player’s – mind. How was that achieved? Psycho Mantis could “read your mind” and counter all of your actions if you left the PlayStation controller in the first control port; this boss also read the PlayStation memory cards to see if there was any save data for other games by Metal Gear Solid’s publisher, Konami. Players had to learn to either adapt to the fight…or just move the controller to the second port.

Fortunately, more games are playing with the structure of the narrative for dramatic effect. PlayStation 2 classic Shadow of the Colossus uses bare minimalism to create an emotionally meaningful experience. It’s gaming structure at its simplest — the protagonist must go defeat a series of bosses to save his beloved princess — but the sparseness of the world that the player rides and hunts in creates a stillness, a narrative white space that contrasts with the brutal climbing and killing of the gentle yet gigantic colossi the player must slay. It’s powerful and moving in ways few other games are.

Bioware’s RPGs, including the Baldur’s Gate series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, all seek to evoke emotion through a different method: choice. Knights of the Old Republic popularized a trend towards good/evil choice in games — actions and dialogue in KOTOR affected your character’s development and standing within the game’s community, as well as storyline options that were available. Some characters’ quests were only available if you were good or evil enough, and the theory was that gamers would go for one path or another but must live with their decisions.

Fallout 3's Broken Steel downloadable content retroactively changes the ending to the game from a hard, final conclusion, to a jumping-off point for more end-game content.

Other games, like the Fallout series and the Fable series, have highlighted this as well, but the concept of choice and decisions making last affects on characters hasn’t been executed as well as possible. Why? Gamers right now do not want these choices to be permanent. Downloadable content for Fable II allowed gamers the opportunity to shortcut around the game’s end-of-storyline decisions; everything from weight (gained or lost by diet) to the story’s final impossible choice are reversible now, albeit for a price. A similar effect is achieved in Fallout 3’s Broken Steel downloadable content, which ret-cons the game’s ending, adds new storyline content, and allows the player to continue playing with their character. In Fallout 3, enough good (or evil) karma will balance the other side out; some choices are permanent, but many aren’t. The emotional impact choice and living with decisions can have is washed a bit when it lacks permanence.

One of the highest achievements for all art — including television, music, movies, and, yes, video games — is to convey a strong emotion. Whether that’s happiness, sadness, fear, joy, or whatever the case may be, if a song moves you to tears or a movie makes you laugh for days, that piece of art has succeeded. With gaming, there is a unique opportunity to provide an even stronger emotional connection with a medium because of the interactive nature of video games. While games have not had that watershed storytelling event — there hasn’t been “a Citizen Kane of gaming” as of yet — watch how developers continue to find new ways to tell powerful stories that utilize interactivity and personal choice.

Also, the two-hour season finale of Lost didn’t help much.

Hurley certainly isn't happy with the lateness of this post

Thankfully, it seems, Wednesday was relatively calm as far as news goes: DICE learned from its console prejudices, Blizzard reaffirmed its next MMO is not World of Warcraft: Part Deux and Microsoft bolstered its Platinum Hits collection.

Expect these explosions to somehow be more "hardcore" in the next console Battlefield title

Veteran Battlefield franchise creative director Lars Gustavsson admits that with Battlefield: Bad Company the team treated console gamers “a bit more gently” in crafting content due to DICE‘s PC background. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Gustavsson talks about the company’s natural progression with its Battlefield games, moving from basic multiplayer functions in Battlefield 1942 to more advanced matchmaking in Bad Company. Still, Gustavsson emphasizes that although the team created a strong console Battlefield game in Bad Company, they now understand future console versions have to be as complex and tailored to hardcore online players as the PC versions have always been.

It’s certainly an appropriate admission for the studio, as Bad Company–though a superb single-player experience that foreshadowed the quality and attention DICE would put into Mirror’s Edge–just didn’t feel like Battlefield. The online portion was very similar in spirit to Battlefield 2 with class load-outs and various vehicles to utilize, but it was more of the same, albeit less grandiose than the PC games. Admittedly, it’s not that easy to shove 64 players into an Xbox Live multiplayer match.

The question now is if DICE will extend these retrospective revelations to their upcoming sequel to Bad Company–otherwise, it’s all talk.  Furthermore, what do Gustavsson’s comments mean for the anticipated (though only rumored) Battlefield 3? Would a hypothetical BF3 become a multi-platform release, a series first for a direct sequel, or will the next core title follow the past trend of PC release first and a stripped-down console counterpart later?

Sorry classic Blizzard franchises–no MMO for you. Besides, Warcraft, you already had your turn.

Though rumored in the past and even partially confirmed by the company itself, Blizzard Entertainment has officially expressed that their next massively multiplayer online title currently in-development will not be based on any of their established StarCraft, Diablo or Warcraft franchises.

World of Warcraft is popular. We all know that. And despite the wide variance in personal feelings about the game, it would be wise to give the Blizzard crew credit where credit’s due–they honed their franchises to be the blockbusters they are today through their own capability and craftsmanship. The company completely deserves its praise and sales.

Still, it’s not always a guaranteed good move to release a brand new MMO under a fresh intellectual property, even if you’re Blizzard. If this next game won’t be based on neither their space, mythical nor fantasy efforts, then what could it possibly be about? Maybe a modern-day MMO where players level up through working menial labor tasks at minimum wage.

We’ll call it: World of Wagecraft.

Army of Two: This much battle-buddy man-love can now be had for less!

Here’s quite the PSA for budget-conscious gamers: Microsoft has added eight new titles to their Platinum Hits line, including popular titles like Gears of War and Mass Effect. It’s good to see Microsoft is bolstering its $20 to $30 hits line (which, admittedly, is an extremely baffling price difference), but let’s be honest here: Gears of War is a nearly three-year-old title and Mass Effect has been selling at the $20 range for awhile now at Best Buy and other retailers.

However, the Mass Effect repackaging does come with the $5 Bring Down the Sky DLC as a bonus–quite the addition for gamers who’ve yet to add BioWare’s fantastic RPG to their collections.

The full list of the new Platinum Hits games, complete with Metacritic links for the curious,  are as follows:

• Gears of War
• Forza Motorsport 2
• Mass Effect
• Viva Piñata
• Army of Two
• Battlefield: Bad Company
• Burnout Paradise
• Fight Night Round 3

Note: Nick pointed out that GameStop stores are offering used copies of Forza Motorsport 2 in a bundle with Marvel: Ultimate Alliance for under $20. That offer is a bit more cost-effective if you don’t mind pre-played games.